Scent dogs shown to sniff Covid with better sensitivity than Covid tests

Scent dogs specialised in following scent and smells could provide for a cheaper, faster and more effective way to detect COVID-19, scientists say after reviewing 29 studies where dogs were used in detecting Covid.

These hunting breeds, known to have the most sensitive noses among dogs, were found to detect Covid, including its variants and also long Covid, in symptomatic, pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic patients with similar or better sensitivity and specificity than the current gold-standard RT-PCR tests or antigen tests.

"Although many people have heard about the exceptional abilities of dogs to help humans, their value to the medical field has been considered fascinating, but not ready for real-world medical use," said Tommy Dickey, University of California, Santa Barbara, US, and the study's corresponding author.

In one of the studies reviewed, four of the dogs detected the same as a drop (0.05 mL) of odorous content dissolved in a water amount filling up more than 10.5 Olympic-sized swimming pools, this study published in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine said.

An Olympic swimming pool is sized 50 metres long, 25 metres wide and between 2 and 3 metres in depth.

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A major benefit of using dogs for detecting Covid was the speed with which they gave results, the scientists said, which could be obtained in seconds to minutes.

Further, it did not require expensive lab equipment or create mountains of plastic waste, unlike conventional diagnostic approaches, they said.

Involving 19 different dog breeds, all these 29 studies put together analysed over 31,000 samples by more than 400 scientists from over 30 countries.

While in some studies, the scent dogs sniffed people directly, sometimes in public places as a health screening, in others, they sniffed patients' sweat, saliva or urine samples.

Dogs are known to possess up to 300 million scent-related cells, compared to just 5 or 6 million in humans, and use one-third of their brains to process scent information, compared with just 5 per cent of human use.

Dogs have been trained and been successful in identifying patients with certain cancers, Parkinson's and diabetes, by sniffing out specific compounds created in the diseased body.

Dickey and team believes their research demonstrates the readiness of medical scent dogs for mainstream medical applications.

"Having conducted this review, we believe that scent dogs deserve their place as a serious diagnostic methodology that could be particularly useful during pandemics, potentially as part of rapid health screenings in public spaces.

"We are confident that scent dogs will be useful in detecting a wide variety of diseases in the future," said Dickey.

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